The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (201 page)

 
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The founder of one of Latin America's most durable political movements, Juan Domingo Perón (1895–1974) was twice President of Argentina (1946–55 and 1973–4).
Born the son of a Sardinian immigrant, Perón pursued a military career. An admirer of European fascism in the 1930s, he helped organize a military coup in 1943. In the ensuing regime Perón used the position of labour secretary to win favour among the unions-a tactic rewarded in 1945 when workers' protests secured his release following imprisonment by rivals.
Elected president in 1946, Perón legislated to improve the conditions of Argentine workers. Women were enfranchised thanks in part to his second wife Maria Eva Duarte (
Evita
), who played a large role in Perónism. Perón used protectionist measures and state intervention in the economy to develop national industries. Re-elected in 1952, he was eventually deposed by the military in 1955. Perón then spent eighteen years in exile before returning to power in 1973.
Perónism was a populist movement whose social and political composition changed over the years, although generally it attracted strong labour support. Perón led the movement in an authoritarian manner, but believed in the value of mass mobilization and allowed local groups a degree of autonomy during his years in exile.
Justicialismo
, the official doctrine of the movement, emphasized principles of social justice, international non-alignment, and economic nationalism. However, during the 1980s, leadership of the movement passed to Carlos Menem (elected Argentine President 1989), under whom labour influence declined and government policy was marked by economic liberalism and support for Washington.
RG 

 
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The ‘personal is political’ is a frequently brandished idea of women's liberation. It is held that a politics of analysing women's identities and personal experiences is liberatory for them. It is believed that there is not much difference between an individual's personal existence, belief, ideas, and the pursuit of politics, and that the more women transform their lives and consciousness, the more they realize the potential for change, they cannot be dependent on a revolution to liberate them. However, politics based on personal experiences and personal identity shares the danger of becoming too personalized. It also shares the danger of excluding issues affecting different women.
STh 

 
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Term used by Marx to describe the class intermediate between proletariat and bourgeoisie. Within this category he included artisans, shopkeepers, and peasants, those groups who depended upon self-employed labour and small productive property ownership (using their own tools and tilling their own plots). They were not capitalist because they were not involved in the exploitative extraction of surplus labour from wage-workers.
As a transitional class, the
petite bourgeoisie
were both vulnerable to impoverishment and the risk of proletarianization and the anxiety this created, and yet also thought of themselves as ‘bourgeois’, aspiring to the lifestyle of the superior class. Marx argued that they joined in short-term alliances with the proletariat to agitate for democratic rights but would inevitably support the bourgeoisie in its suppression of revolutionary movements (the 1848 Revolution in France was a classic example of this). Petit bourgeois parties had played significant roles in social and political mobilization but were fundamentally reactionary. In
The Class Struggles in France
(1850), Marx warned against the danger of petit bourgeois socialism which had a radical façade, but was intrinsically reformist and whose aim was to maintain control over the proletariat.
Marx believed that the
petite bourgeoisie
would eventually disappear, caught up in the class polarization between bourgeoisie and proletariat and forced to choose between them politically. Here he anticipated some petit bourgeois intellectuals rejecting their class origins and adopting the cause of the proletariat.
The
petite bourgeoisie
has not disappeared, but it remains strongly right-wing. In some countries, including Britain, the
petite bourgeoisie
supports the right-wing party more strongly than do managerial and professional workers.
GS 

 
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A phenomenon is that which appears. In the political and philosophical senses of phenomenology, the basic concept therefore is ‘the study of appearances (as unspokenly opposed to reality)’. The term was popularized by Hegel's title
The Phenomenology of Spirit
and later, with a different meaning, by Edmund Husserl (1859–1938). For Husserl , phenomena can be studied only subjectively, not objectively—thus phenomenology is a close cousin of existentialism ( see
Sartre
). Some psychologists borrowed the term to mean ‘as naïve and full a description of direct experience as possible’, and applied it to the perception of sensations of such things as colour and motion.

 
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